A Life Lived on the Margins
by Dark Mirage1
Summary: Danielle Hartman muses upon her childhood at Genomex, and her time in the 'underground'. [story is complete, but the rest of it must be typed]


Danielle.doc3

2009

Danielle

For the first 800 miles or so after leaving Adam's safe house, I had an exhilarating sense of leaving behind the last remnants of an old and troubling part of my life. Then, I started to think.

I had a lot to think about. Each mile put another layer of time over the memories, but I knew I would still have to resolve some of the old questions.

I had not really wanted to see Adam again. That's why I tried first to steal his sequencer, in the desperate hope that it came with instructions and I could avoid Adam. No such luck.

When I was 18-19 years old, I was flattered by Adam's attentions. Later, I realized how peculiar it was for a highly educated guy in his 30s, the Prince of Genomex himself, to be interested in an unintellectual teenager. Looking back I now realize that Adam's arrogance and unbounded self-absorption made him less than desirable company among his age and intellectual female peers, women who wanted someone they could talk with, not someone who would talk at them about his technical achievements.

I heard stories about women falling asleep over dinner with Adam. At the time I did not understand how that could happen, because I was so thrilled to be in the company of the Prince that he could have read to me from a technical manual and I would have listened adoringly.

When we went to public places, people probably thought we were father and daughter, such was the disparity in our ages. A little later, when Adam was into his disco cowboy phase, there was no mistaking our relationship as anything other than odd and unequal. I looked back on it as an unfortunate result of my immaturity and naiveté at the time. The memories embarrassed me.

Paul Breedlove and Eleanor Singer practically raised me at Genomex. I was a sickly baby and a sickly child. Genomex paid for everything, every treatment, every test, every pill, but the emotional toll on my parents was crushing. When I was born, they had been married 17 years and throughout that time had tried to have a child. Revelation of a genetic incompatibility brought them first to one of the satellite Breedlove Clinics, then to Genomex and Breedlove himself.

I know now that their initial consultation took place in the wake of full understanding of the implications of Gabriel Ashlocke's "problems". He was just a toddler then, but a toddler predisposed to maim, destroy, and kill. Years before Adam developed stasis technology, Ashlocke was kept several levels below ground in a permanent unconscious, coma-like state, using no fewer than five medications simultaneously in case one ceased working effectively. He was observed by closed circuit television every moment of every day. His respiration and heartbeats were monitored and tracked for variations or changes. Once a day, every day, the boy's head was shaved for the ease of attachment of sensors yielding a continuous electroencephalogram.

Ashlocke was so potentially dangerous that I have wondered often why there was never a convenient "accident" or lapse in care leading to the boy's death. The "life" he was "living" was bleak, even cruel. Death might have been a mercy.

I learned all of these things very much later. My parents were informed of none of it.

With the disaster of Gabriel Ashlocke so recently contained, Paul Breedlove and Eleanor Singer proceeded with great caution during the period of 1970-1978, and never again produced another monster. Only a relative handful of Genomex mutants were born in these years. Most of them would be born later, after Adam's hiring. In the years 1979-1988, hundreds would be born annually; I doubt if even Adam knows the true total.

When I was born in 1972, my parents at last had a child of their own and were wildly happy. I recall seeing dozens of photographs of me as a baby, with smiling parents and other smiling people. I must have family somewhere, since some of the women looked so much like my mother.

But the photos are gone now. The names of the people in them I never knew anyway.

When my health deteriorated such that I was hardly ever home, my parents divorced and signed custody of me over to Eleanor Singer. My mother re-married, and acquired another name. Not knowing her new name, I could never begin to track her later on. My father stayed in the area and came to see me every eighteen months on Sunday afternoon for more than a year. Then he dropped dead of a coronary on the job. Only Paul Breedlove and Eleanor Singer were present at his funeral, so he appears to have had no family.

Once I started making the transition from child to woman, my mutant talent began to quickly deepen and develop. Dr Singer had told me that my stealth talent would appear and be controllable, but even so, I was terrified until I learned to control my stealthiness.

By this time, Adam was creating several mutants a week. That implied that he actually started many more times that number of mutant-bearing pregnancies since only about twenty percent resulted in a live, viable birth.

Until the mid-1980s, once could wander as one pleased through –and under—the Genomex facility, if you had the right pass. Since I lived there, I had the right pass. I could poke around in odd corners and not even be seen!

I knew where to find all of the interesting sights, and I took other mutants who lived at Genomex on tours. We were never caught. Getting away with this was very satisfying.

There were other stealths like me, but none with my talent or health. They were usually nearly bedridden and could never train properly. Not surprisingly, I was the subject of much study and attention. This brought me into frequent contact with Adam.

Adam enjoyed one great advantage in dealing with the children of Genomex who lived at the facility: he was the only adult who took a personal interest in us. He was also a link to the world outside, a world where none of us belonged.

Sometimes Adam would take a group of us out into that wider world. For a long time I puzzled over his motivations until learned he spent his adolescence at Stanford. He was compensating for that lost experience with us. He did not have adult friends, not until the mid-1980s.

Genomex performed a lot of contract research for the federal government. Adam told me the feds were not satisfied with the security arrangements at the site, so security procedures would have to be considerably tightened.

The hiring of Mason Eckhart was part of the plan of enhanced security. He wasn't the only one hired for this task, but he was the one with ideas, and clearly, he was driving the plan.

It seemed odd at first that Mason Eckhart went out of his way to befriend Adam, but after Adam brought several of us to the Eckharts' home, the truth came to me: he was trying to get Adam out of the lab and socializing with adults. Jackie Eckhart usually invited a single girlfriend to these events. Considering what happened later, I know this will seem impossible, but the way most people described Mason in those days was "nice".


End file.
